Research planned for the coming project year concerns mainly the mechanics of the cochlea of the inner ear, sound transduction in the cochlear hair cells into electrical receptor potentials, relationships between spike rates in auditory nerve fibers and parameters of sound stimuli, and the relationship between subjective sensory magnitudes such as loudness and the numbers assigned to them in the magnitude estimation procedure. With respect to cochlear mechanics, the available empirical knowledge and the most recent insights derived from it are being integrated with the help of an electrical network model evaluated on a digital computer. The model is applicable to the interpretation of functional effects of cochlear pathology. The study of cochlear hair cells based on intra- and extracellular recording has a dual purpose of a better understanding of sensory mechanoreceptors and of an analytical interpretation of the patterns of firing rates of auditory nerve fibers. These patterns are studied systematically in the time, frequency, and intensity domains, with the ultimate goal of being able to specify the nerve output for any sound stimulus, in particular speech stimuli. The study of both hair cells and nerve fibers comprises both normal and pathological conditions. The question of the relationship between subjective magnitudes and numbers assigned to them in a psychophysical scaling procedure is one of the most fundamental problems of psychophysics. Its investigation on the project is based on a new insight aided by a mathematical derivation and is in the process of completion.